by Andrew Smith
I assumed from our short conversation that Gweese and Livingston must have been teenagers. After all, they acted just like moody, punk kids. I found out later that the boys were actually many thousands of years old.
“Now, Gweese. Mind your manners! We’re guests here!” Queen Dot said, “I promise to bring you a treat after dinner.”
“Treat” is also a tricky word.
The Things We’d Never Seen Before
So, before tooling off to whatever parts of the universe she liked to hang out in besides the shithole that is my father’s cruise ship, Queen Dot obviously intended to have dinner with the humans, which knocked one of Parker’s questions off the list.
She ate.
He did fearlessly manage to ask the other two, however, to which Queen Dot had said, “Well, aren’t you the most adorable primitively designed machine ever!”
“I just don’t understand what she meant by ‘primitively designed,’ ” Parker said. “Is it because I don’t poop?”
Billy and I were walking back to our stateroom to put on proper go-to-dinner-with-an-actual-queen outfits. Parker was either going to have to go back to Alberta to retrieve his valet uniform, risking an encounter with a ravenous bisexual giraffe, or just do what any other horny and practically naked cog did when they were undressed, which was something I had no idea was even a contingency coded into Parker’s reasoning circuits.
“Well, I’ll call it a safe bet that Queen Dot has been around enough to have seen plenty of machines,” I said.
“But v.4 cogs are the most technologically advanced consumer products in existence,” Parker argued, quoting directly from a Hinsoft International advertisement.
I had to remind myself that Parker was just a machine, and not a living, breathing, pouty teenage boy with a distorted self-image and a permanent hard-on.
“Too bad we never got to see a v.4x,” Billy said. “The last cogs. The ones that ended the world.”
“Whatever,” Parker said. “And I have an erection.”
And Billy Hinman, who never cared for cogs at all, added, “Primitively designed, Parker.”
“At least he doesn’t eat other cogs,” I said. “That’s a new one, right? I mean, Captain Myron, Dr. Geneva, and Maurice the giraffe. I never saw cogs eat other cogs before.”
Billy said, “Neither did I. Maybe there was an episode about it on Rabbit & Robot.”
And if anyone might have ever seen nontelevised cogs cannibalizing other cogs, it would have been Billy Hinman, whose father manufactured—or used to manufacture—every cog that had ever been made.
“I never get hungry, Cager,” Parker said.
We stopped in the hallway. The elevator door whooshed open. And then we came face-to-face with the two girls I was absolutely convinced had been flying with us all along on the Tennessee.
And it was her—the girl I’d seen on the wicket screen to Deck 21. And, in the worst scenario imaginable, I was standing there in nothing but my underwear, next to Billy Hinman and a cog with an obvious erection, who were both similarly dressed.
Actual human beings.
Girl ones.
I wanted to die.
In fact, my initial reaction was to run and hide, which I probably would have done if I hadn’t been so mesmerized by seeing that girl’s face—and not on some impersonal mechanized screen.
The girls wore the shimmering, baggy, extremely unflattering emergency extravehicular suits we had to put on after the blender ride with the gravity generators. And I know that the total elapsed time that we stood there awkwardly and silently staring at each other couldn’t have been more than a few seconds at most, but it felt like decades to me. The introductions were painfully strained, but here was another thing I could cross off my list of never-have-done events: introducing myself to two fully clothed girls while I and my companions were standing there in our underwear.
We said our names, and our nice-to-meet-yous, all very mechanized, robotic, strained.
“It’s you,” the girl from the wicket—Meg—said.
And Jeffrie, the younger girl, said, “Cheepa Yeep.”
Billy shook his head. “No. We don’t go to school.”
It was a hopeless situation. I felt so stupid and dizzy. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I did the usual nervous hands thing and held them in front of my crotch, which made me feel even dumber.
“I saw you on Deck Twenty-One the other night, or whenever it was,” I said. “When I almost got arrested.”
I watched as the girls looked us all up and down. Billy, as usual, didn’t care about anything, and Parker—well, he was just an idiot cog. Both girls’ eyes came to pause at the obvious tent pitched in Parker’s briefs.
“Are you dropout boys going to a party or something?” Jeffrie asked.
I felt the sickening bloom of redness spreading through my neck and up to my ears. “Um, don’t look at him. He’s a cog.”
I hitchhiked a thumb at Parker, then pointed to Billy Hinman and me. “We are humans.”
“Greetings, humans,” Meg said. “We are also humans. Ones who also don’t go to school, but ones with clothes on.”
And Billy said, “A fucking tiger ate our pants and shirts. And the cog’s just horny all the time and wanted to undress so he could look just like Cager.”
“Cager? That’s what the guard said your name was. I thought it was your job, or your last name or something,” Meg said. She looked directly at me.
“Um, it was my great-grandfather’s name. Or whatever.”
“Cager?” Parker asked.
I desperately did not want Parker to say anything. Not ever.
But he continued, “Cager, they are not humans. These girls are cogs. I can read them. They’re both attendants on Deck 21, which is a very nasty place for boys your age, but it is where they’re supposed to work. They shouldn’t even be permitted anywhere near the accommodations or arrivals decks.”
“No,” I said, “there must be something wrong with you. They are real girls. I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. You don’t understand, Parker. They smell like people.”
“Trust me, Cager. They’re cogs,” Parker said.
“I rigged it,” Meg said. “I’ll show you what I did. Can one of you open your thumbphone?”
I’d also never seen Billy Hinman move so quickly. And in that fumbling half second when we both attempted to get our screens active, I was certain that, like me, Billy was praying to the gods of technology to get his phone online, because we needed these girls to be real more than we needed anything else in the universe at that moment. And also in that fumbling half second when we opened our screens between our hands, I found myself becoming more than just a little jealous of Billy Hinman, my perfect and good-looking friend, because I was the one who met her first, and he needed to stay the hell away from her.
Our screens flashed on in front of our bare chests.
But nothing.
“They stopped working about a week go,” Billy said, “Otherwise, I’d have gotten off this shithole and I’d be back home right now.”
“We may be the only humans left anywhere. And Rowan, my caretaker, too,” I said.
“They’re cogs,” Parker insisted.
Whatever.
Happy New Year, Happy No Year
I had never seen Rowan in such a disappointed, miserable mood.
In fact, I’d never really seen Rowan in any mood besides just Rowan-ness.
“Um, Happy New Year’s Eve?” I said.
It was a failed attempt at cracking the polar ice sheet between us.
Rowan was clearly not speaking to me.
“Happy No Year,” Billy added.
At least it was a good thing we didn’t have the girls or Parker with us when we got back to our room. It was Billy Hinman’s suggestion that coming back home in our underwear with two girls, after ditching Rowan all day, would probably cause what he called “awkward social disharmony.”
I realized as soon as Rowan saw us that Billy was absolutely right. The awkward social disharmony was awkward and disharmonious enough as it was.
And Parker had stubbornly refused to accept that I was right about Meg and Jeffrie being humans, so if he had been programmed for such things, he’d be as miserable and upset as Rowan was with me. I ordered him to go fetch a proper valet uniform, which even furthered his annoyance because, well, he was Parker, and he preferred to not be confined by such social conventions as clothing.
Meg and Jeffrie had gone out to break into a stateroom on another floor, and to steal some human clothes not intended for extravehicular emergencies from one of the shopping malls on the Tennessee.
It was New Year’s Eve, the last one anyone anywhere would ever think about—going all the way back to the reign of Julius Caesar—and I didn’t care if Rowan was mad at me.
Kind of.
“Are you mad about something?” I asked.
Rowan said, “No.”
So Billy offered, “Are you at all interested in finding out where we were all day, and why we’ve got nothing on but our underwear?”
Rowan looked at him with a cold, unenthusiastic expression.
“Well, here’s the short version, and keep in mind, it could be a lot worse, Rowan,” Billy said. “We snuck out while you were sleeping, and went swimming in a fake Canadian lake. Then a fucking tiger scared Parker up a tree and chewed the shit out of our clothes. A French giraffe named Maurice ate most of the tiger—his name is Juan, and he still has a head, so he can talk, but he’s very depressed, and who can blame him? Then these three liquid aliens in a flying blue fetus boarded the ship, and they want to have dinner with us, but we’re in our underwear, so we were coming back to our room to put on some clothes, and on the way we found two real, human girls who’ve been hiding on the Tennessee ever since we got here. Happy New Year, Rowan! Would you run the shower for Cager and get some nice outfits ready for us? We’re starving!”
Rowan raised that one eyebrow and looked at me.
I shrugged. “Exactly what Billy just said.”
Rowan pouted, if pouting was something he was capable of doing, but he quietly went into the bathroom and turned on the shower for me. In his usual routine, he stood at the door holding a towel and waiting for me to go inside.
I said, “If it makes any difference in tie color, we’re dining with a queen for New Year’s Eve.”
I grabbed the towel and gave it a quick smell. All boys do that, right? Especially ones with noses like mine, not that any boys I ever knew had noses like mine. Not that there were any boys anywhere besides here anymore. I could smell just the faintest trace of Rowan’s cologne on the towel, but it was, as you’d expect of anything you’d put in the hands of a Messer on a ship like the Tennessee, perfectly fresh.
And Rowan added, “If it makes any difference in dining options, Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique looks like Nuremberg in May of 1945.”
“Thirty wars don’t just fight themselves,” Billy said.
“Ring down and have them tidy up for us. It’s New Year’s, and I own this ship,” I said.
I went inside the bathroom and stepped under the shower. As usual Rowan had known the perfect temperature to set it for me.
I felt like such a spoiled piece of shit.
Freedom, and an Unemployed Cog in the Hallway
The truth is, the girls didn’t want Billy Hinman and me to know where they were staying.
But I could smell them in the hallways, and I could follow where they’d gone as easily as if they’d left behind their footprints in black ink for me.
So, while Billy showered, I knotted my tie, slipped on my jacket and shoes, and left. Rowan had sullenly gone next door to prepare himself as our escort on this final New Year’s Eve for all eternity. Billy and I were in a mood to cause trouble—to do something wild. I could feel it. And this was the second time today I’d ditched Rowan.
I was beginning to feel my freedom.
Freedom was not caring about Charlie Greenwell or Woz or the Hotel Kenmore bonks and coders or Mother Earth or playing Hocus Pocus with mercenary fake friends or the thirty wars that weren’t going to just fight themselves or whether or not I could get a signal response from my fucking thumbphone.
Freedom smelled like Meg Hatfield.
I loved the Tennessee.
Space was making me crazy.
They were two floors below us. I found their room.
A valet cog who looked like he could have been Parker’s younger, possibly hornier brother was lying facedown in the hallway, a victim of the accident with gravity the other night. He was sleeping and unbroken, but his little red, drum-shaped valet’s cap with the gold cords wrapped around it had rolled about ten feet away from his head, and one of his shoes was off.
I wondered whom he’d been intended for—my mother or father? One of the Hinmans? And I wondered, given the circumstances down on Earth, if he would ever be woken up out of necessity or plan, or if maybe he’d just lie there motionless in the hallway until one of the cannibalistic cogs wandering the decks found something new and convenient to snack on.
Why did I feel sorry for him? I should have kicked him. I did think about it. He was as useless as a vacuum cleaner with a busted drive belt. I picked up his cap and placed it on his head.
I said, “Here you go, Little Parker.”
Then I knocked.
I expected they wouldn’t answer the door. Why would they? I imagined I’d scared the shit out of them simply by knocking on it in the first place.
So I agonized over whether I should knock again, and I waited, trying to hear anything from the other side of the door. But this was the Tennessee, the cruise ship to end all cruise ships. Of course all the rooms were quiet.
I thought about how terrifying it might be to stand in a hallway and overhear the sounds of my parents—or Billy Hinman’s parents—having sex.
“Hey. It’s me. Cager. And I have actual pants on now, which is something I have never before felt I needed to point out to anyone in order to get them to answer their door for me. So, I guess, there’s a first time for most things, if you’re lucky to live long enough.”
I waited.
“Meg?”
Finally the wicket screen on the door came alive, and I saw her again.
Meg smiled, like she liked me or something, which was an idea that was a little hard for me to wrap my head around, since she didn’t know who I was, and she wasn’t being paid by Mr. and Mrs. Messer to be nice to me.
“Are you wearing a tuxedo?” she said.
Damn. It felt as though every blood cell in my body was crowding its way up toward my ears.
“Um, well, I may not know how to drive a car or turn on my own bath, but I can tie a pretty neat bow tie.” I opened my jacket so she could see my shoulder. “And rock the suspenders.”
“Did that cog kid tell you he helped us get in here or something?”
“Parker? No. I found you all by myself. Parker’s out trying to find his own clothes. As much as he wanted to, I was not about to let him come to New Year’s Eve with me in his underwear,” I said.
Meg scrunched her eyebrows together. “Oh, yeah. New Year’s Eve.”
“Not that it matters or anything.”
“I haven’t even been keeping track of time.”
“It’s impossible to keep time up here. Or down here. Or wherever the hell direction we are relative to where we came from.”
For a moment we stared at each other through the artificial everything of the wicket screen, neither of us saying a word. And to be honest, for the first time in my life I felt as though I were meeting a real human being. That’s a weird thing to say, I know, coming from Earth, where I’d been packed in with billions of other human beings, but this was something different, something new.
I’d never had an allergic reaction to anything, but Meg Hatfield made my throat feel anaphylactic.
I said, “So. Are you going to come ou
t? Or let me in? Or whatever?”
The back of my neck tingled, and my entire body dampened a bit, thinking about Meg Hatfield inviting me into her room. I could almost smell it through the screen.
Meg glanced over her shoulder, into the room. “Jeffrie’s almost finished getting dressed. Give me a minute.”
Then the screen went dark, and I was alone in the hallway with the corpse of an unemployed cog. I pushed his shoe over toward his foot, just so it would be there for him if he woke up and got confused about his outfit being messed up. But that wasn’t being nice; it was being efficient, and also looking out for anyone who might trip over the kid’s monstrously big shoe. I put my foot alongside it. It must have been size fourteen.
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking about stealing that poor boy’s shoes!”
The hallway lightened, and I turned around to see Meg standing in front of her open doorway. She looked like if I touched her, I’d turn to ashes on the spot.
“Oh. Um. No. Wow,” I said.
Meg had this dress on. It was an immeasurable improvement to the spacesuit I’d seen her in earlier. Black. It fit her body so perfectly, it was as though the thing had been made only for Meg Hatfield and nobody else, not ever. The dress was open on the shoulders and dropped to a slight V between her collarbones, then tapered in at her waist and out at her hips, and dead-ended midway down her thighs.
Stop. Those legs.
Meg’s hair was pulled back, and she stood there, looking at me with one hand on her hip. I swallowed. If I couldn’t touch her or dance with her tonight at some point (and thank whatever thing is out here with us in space that was responsible for such things as human beings and hearts and hormones that Billy Hinman and I learned how to dance in those goddamned etiquette classes), I was certain I was going to die.
“It’s easy to steal things when there’s no one around to watch you do it. And it looks like maybe you shop at the same place. Very nice outfit, Cager,” Meg said.
Another thing I had never done before in my pathetic and privileged life: flirt with someone I was so attracted to, and then have her flirt back, too.
